account Account Visibility

Outlaw630,

For all intents and purposes, accounts aren't deleted. Period. There are no conditions. Literally deleting accounts would harm referential integrity within the database itself so isn't really possible.

In regards to your information, you have full control over what appears in your profile and to whom within your settings page.

Guugley: We cannot "remove a user's profile from Google search results." They're indexed by Google because that's what Google do. If people post personal information on their profile pages and make it viewable to the public, this is unsurprisingly subject to being crawled by various search and archive bots who will make whatever they find searchable.

The best course of action has already been recommended here: if you don't want your information indexed, set your information to private within your settings so it doesn't appear in your profile. Eventually at the next crawl time Google, and others, will update their data and your profile will stop showing up when searching for your real name, etc.

Unfortunately, such is the nature of the internet, once the genie is out of the bottle it becomes difficult to put back in. There's so many search and archival services who retain information they've found for a long time purposefully. If you want privacy people should think long and hard about what information they choose to expose to the public web in the first instance.

In that case the user was requesting to remove their account entirely or find a quick way to speed up the cache update, given the recent surges lately to remove information it's becoming a bit more difficult to cater to these requests as well.

I never ended up disabling their profile as the google crawler had updated their information within the 24hr period.

In the future we'll likely look at ways to better establish what qualifies for Super / Admin intervention and what doesn't though. Ex. if someone is locked out of their account or it's just ancient and unrecoverable by them it might pull support as long as it's not just "I don't want people to know I behaved like a kid when I was a kid" as the reasoning.

Worse comes to worse, many sources like Archive.org can still dig up your info anyway and we have no control on that.